Post-Truth and Education: STS Vaccines to Re-establish Science in the Public Sphere.

Abstract

Post-truth is a social condition that threatens the trust in science and people’s critical thinking. This paper analyzes some of the educational responses to post-truth, claiming the potential contributions of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Some of the responses based on traditional epistemology, characterized as epistemological vaccines, are contrasted with some of the possible responses based on a more complex and interdisciplinary knowledge of science and technology. It is argued that epistemological vaccines, despite having an enormous value in fighting against post-truth, are insufficient to transform this social condition and its implications for science and technology. It is sustained that a social epistemology and, moreover, an expert interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge of science and technology, such as the one offered by STS, is required to consolidate stronger educational strategies, formulating STS vaccines, that could be useful as a counterweight to understand and deconstruct post-truth. Given that the STS academic field has developed a good account of how scientific facts and social trust in science are constructed, it also has the capacity to show how post-truth and alternative facts are constructed, unmasking for whom it is important that we decry science. The conclusion points toward the urgency to rethink the current influence of the STS field in the educational context to relocate the STS education.